SRS Abstract for Reingen, 1978

Reingen research focuses on six behavioral influence strategies of inducing people to comply with a request. Two of the strategies play a role in furthering 'door-in-the-face' theory.

Reingen used 224 students at the University of South Carolina as the participants.

Regarding procedure, experimenters approached subjects and dependent on the condition to which subjects were assigned attempted to gain compliance with the secondary request (except in the control condition). The messages varied across six different compliance strategies.

The dependent measure was the percentage of subjects that complied with the second request based on their treatment condition, and the total amount of money that was contributed based on an equal amount of subjects in each condition, and the average amount donated with each incidence of compliance.

The results suggested that among 'door-in-the-face' techniques that and extreme request followed by a donation request had the most beneficial outcomes. The implications being that the findings from this research should be of value to anyone wishing to elicit compliance with a request to donate money.